Boosting the Bottom Line: Beatrice Morrow Cannady's Tactics to Promote The Advocate, 1923–1933

Abstract

This article examines the strategies Beatrice Morrow Cannady used to persuade people to subscribe for, and renew their subscriptions to, The Advocate, a newspaper for African Americans published in Portland, Oregon, from 1903 until 1936. It also considers her efforts to collect past-due accounts, promote advertisers, and encourage collective action to ensure her paper's success. Although scholars who study the black press agree that finances were a problem for most publishers, few have considered how the stress of worrying about a publication's bottom line might have affected an editor's ability to advocate for equal rights and liberties in her or his community. Yet Cannady's distress is apparent in correspondence to NAACP officials and editorials in her newspaper. Examining her efforts to keep her newspaper afloat may offer a framework for studying other African American papers both small and large and perhaps lead to more nuanced discussions of the similarities—or differences—discovered in regional publications.